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About this Guide

The University of Illinois has been involved in digitizing many important parts of its holdings, from large scale initiatives like the Google Books Project to specialized resources such as the Carl Sandburg papers, aerial photographs of Illinois counties, and French World War I posters.

This guide is meant to give a sense of the range of these digital collections and to make it easier to discover ones that interest you. Below is a brief description of the different places on the library website where you can find these collections. The tabs at the top of this guide organize the individual collections by topic.

The History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library (HPNL) has digitized the serial runs of Illinois newspapers (the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections) and agricultural newspapers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the Farm, Field, and Fireside: Agricultural Newspapers Collection).

IDEALS collects, disseminates, and provides persistent and reliable access to the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students at U of I. The IDEALS collection includes dissertations, published and unpublished articles, conference presentations, and Power Point slides.

501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format

The University Archives hold over 29,000 cubic feet and 3 terabytes of records and personal papers related to the past and present of the University. Although the bulk of this material is print-only, the University Archives staff have also scanned hundreds of photographs and drawings that are accessible through their website.